Before becoming president-elect of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious in 2016, Sister Maya collaborated with the religious conference in Mexico, an experience that taught her there are “two or three versions of the same story – whether it’s because there’s another language or cultural perspective or geography – and that’s important to keep in mind,” she said.

Sister Maya, who is Mexican-American, made the transition to LCWR president Aug. 11, the final night of the conference’s annual assembly in Orlando. She will lead the organization as the rest of the U.S. Catholic Church starts to tip from a majority-Anglo to a majority-Hispanic congregation.

LCWR is an association of the leaders of congregations of Catholic women religious in the United States. The conference has about 1350 members, who represent nearly 80 percent of the approximately 48,500 women religious in the United States

Her position goes beyond simply representing Latina and minority sisters or the demographic changes of the U.S. Catholic Church. The perspective and attitude she’ll bring with her, her friends and colleagues say, are unique to a bicultural upbringing and friendly to the concept of change.

Sister Maya, born Dec. 27, 1967, in Mexico City, lived in both Mexico and San Antonio because of her father’s work. Her introduction to religion came from watching her grandmother pray the rosary and accompanying her to church.

As a child, she developed an interest in religious life. But she muffled that thought until she was halfway through working toward her doctorate in Mexico City in 1994.

She told a priest that no one she knew wanted to be a nun and she thought something was wrong with her.

He advised her to try it, which she did.

Sister Maya’s parents were initially disappointed that she wasn’t going to do more with her education, but years later they came to embrace her calling.

Maya graduated with a bachelor’s degree in history from Yale in 1989 and became a certified teacher at schools run by the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word and at the Monterrey Technological and Advanced Studies Institute in Laguna, Mexico.

At the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, she earned her master’s degree in systematic theology in 1991 and eventually went on to the College of Mexico in Mexico City, where she got her doctorate in Latin American colonial church history in 1997.

“She’s a lifelong learner,” said Sister Glenn Anne McPhee of the Dominican Sisters of Mission San Jose, who met Sister Maya in the early 1980s, when she came to the United States as a high school student from Mexico. “She’s a very high-energy person. It’s contagious, and it’s only gotten better over time.”

While studying at Yale, Sister Maya was a school volunteer in New Haven, Connecticut, working in inner-city elementary schools with Latino children. The experience “changed my life forever,” she said.

In 1995, she joined the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word in Mexico City, where she went through formation and professed her final vows in 2002. Their charism – the Incarnation, the actualizing of God’s love as their mission – sold her, even after a lifelong Dominican education and visits to six congregations.

While serving as president-elect of LCWR, Sister Maya said, she learned about the “incredible potential” of collaboration between religious institutions and congregations.

Right now, she said, LCWR is “owning its historical moment.”

“The very fact that that this country has gone into this division and fear, I think it’s the world calling religious and our conferences to witness, to the welcoming of the stranger, to the unity of the diversity, to civil discourse, to being respectful even if we disagree,” she said. “I think there’s a mission in the moment that we need to own, and I see that being fundamental to the next few years.”